Welcome to Weird Science DC Comics, the DC Comics site for the common man and woman. We're not high falutin, just a bunch of dummies who love comics just like you...we just spend an insane amount of time working on this site for no pay. I told you...dummies! So, sit a spell and read our Reviews, News and Articles and if you are really brave, listen to the Weird Science DC Comics Podcast. We triple dog dare you!

Now we come to the payoff: the final issue of Kamandi Challenge, where we are supposed
to figure out what the ding-dong dickens is going on in this comic book. It’s
had its ups and downs, if you define “ups” as “head-scratching moments of
insane anthropomorphic action” and “downs” as “the sheer boredom and tedium of
Tom King’s issue.” Whether a series is good or bad, however, must be considered
based on its conclusion. So let’s find out what my considerations were in my
review of Kamandi Challenge #12,
right here!

Explain
It!

It may have escaped the notice of those who have
regularly read the reviews of this series, but Jim and I (Reggie) have been
reviewing every other issue in this series since it began. It’s been good to
have someone to bounce this thing around with, because had either of us done
this by ourselves I don’t think we’d have hung in with as much enthusiasm as
we’ve got. Reviewing this series in tandem also gave me another perspective
(Jim’s, namely) and I got to see this series somewhat through his point-of-view.
For instance, I never expected and never looked for a cohesive story in Kamandi
Challenge; I figured the “challenge” was each creator digging out of the hole
left by the previous one, and it would primarily be a Kirby love-fest of
talking gorillas in armor shooting laser rifles. Jim, on the other hand, clued
in to the “story” of this series, that Kamandi was looking for his parents, who
had somehow survived the cataclysm and lived on this weird planet Earth
separate from their shirtless boy. And that was proven, several issues ago,
when Kamandi’s mom showed up—despite her actually being an android. Still, it
proves that there is a narrative thread here, one that should be tied up in
this issue.

We begin with the origin story of Kamanda, which is
identical to that of Kamandi’s, except she’s a girl and comes from the bunker
known as Command-A. Floating along a lazy river, she comes across Kamandi and
imparts some cryptic words, before we rejoin Kamandi in the waking world, still
plummeting to Earth with his two armored talking gorilla buddies from the end
of the last issue. The larger gorilla, chieftain of their tribe, wraps both
Kamandi and the other ape in his arm and falls with his back to the ground, so
that when they land, only he dies from the fall. This isn’t how gravity really
works, but I’ll go with it. After the fatally wounded space-terrorist Misfit
launches his Terrornaut, a giant robot that will wipe out all life on earth,
Kamandi teams up with some battle-scarred anthropomorphic rats that combine to
form a giant rat Kaiju, and they trade a couple of punches.

It’s not quite enough, and Kamandi, in charge of the
whole shebang, remembers Dr. Renzi’s Cyclotron Heart from…oh, five or six
issues ago, and how it creates small nuclear explosions to keep working. So
Kamandi figures that a larger Cyclotron heart will destroy the Terrornaut—so
somehow he makes this happen and wipes away the robot, yet Kamandi and the rats
remain unharmed. I don’t really understand what happens in this scene other than
“the good guys win.” At the end, the rats say they knew Kamandi was coming
because they read it from prophecy—a box full of comic books, including some
issue of Kamandi from way back in the
day. And then, Jack Kirby shows up.

This last bit was intended to be written by Len Wein,
and I have to assume that she he expired veteran writer and one-time DC Comics
President was tapped to wrap this up. So the idea is here that Jack Kirby is a
Mr. Mxyzptlk-style imp that can grant Kamandi three wishes with his magical
pencil. And Kamandi is actually some teenage jerk in the present. And, uh…it’s
pretty demeaning to this series, y’all. It’s not so much the inclusion of Jack
Kirby, but his portrayal as a magical genie that adds to the kind of sappy
disappointment that is this ending. I’d have much rather preferred Gail Simone
expand her story a little bit instead of wrapping it up with a Macguffin. The
art, by venerated Bronze Age artist Jose Luís García Lopez, is incredible, but
the story falls kind of flat. And I didn’t expect to be bowled over by the
ending to this “story by secret committee” type of writing experiment, Too bad.
A better homage to Jack “King” Kirby might have been a more straightforward post-apocalyptic
Kamandi story, simply continuing a
winning formula of talking dog-people and dire escapes.

Bits and
Pieces:

An exciting and decidedly silly battle is cut short to pay some awkward homage to Jack Kirby, and that pretty much defines as well as concludes this series. You could do worse than a back-up drawn by José Luis García Lopez, though. That's for sure.